Judicial notebook: Law enforcement use of facial recognition technology

Law enforcement agencies regularly rely on facial recognition technology (FRT) to link images of faces from CCTV footage to possible suspects.

By 2024, two million law enforcement searches per year used one vendor alone (The Record, June 27, 2024).

Defense lawyers and courts often have no idea law enforcement used FRT to identify a suspect—one reason legal challenges to it remain rare.

To identify potential suspects, law enforcement used surveillance camera footage to place a still image of the perpetrator into an FRT program, which they said produced one suspect: Craig Johnson.

Further, an FRT search does not occur in a vacuum: Law enforcement must still examine the candidates and decide whether any is enough of a “match.”